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Lot Essay
Broad swathes of vibrant, richly hued pigment sweep across the grand expanse of Cecily Brown’s triptych It’s not yesterday anymore. Each stroke articulated with a lyrical bravura, Brown’s tripartite composition becomes a poetic reflection on abstraction, generating an enthralling dynamic energy in a flurry of forms while simultaneously refusing to resolve into figuration. “As is painting so is poetry, (ut pictura poesis)” decrees Horace in Ars Poetica, and writing in the exhibition catalogue for To Bend the Ear of the Outer World, where the present work was first exhibited, Brown concludes that “painting is the closest to poetry of all the arts.” The exhibition, curated by Gary Garrels, sought to explore the open-endedness of contemporary abstraction, reflecting on the many visual codes and interpretations which artists ranging from Mark Bradford, Jadé Fadojutimi, Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, Gerhard Richter, and Christopher Wool deploy in their abstract practices. It’s not yesterday anymore is Brown’s triumphant entry into this rich visual symposium, eloquently expressing her desire “to abolish the terms abstract and figurative.” One of her first truly abstract paintings, the present work is a poised meditation on the internalities of her painterly practice, exulting in her learned control of her oil medium, her masterful command over composition, and her expressive use of sumptuous pigment. Prominently positioned at the entry of Garrels’ exhibition, It’s not yesterday anymore has become the standard bearer for the present possibilities of abstraction.
Cecily Brown painted across all three panels of her triptych simultaneously, allowing her unrelenting rain of strokes to cross from one canvas into the next to establish a continuous sense of movement across planes. Highly attuned to tempo, Brown plays with altering themes and variations across the painting, varying the width and length of each brushstroke, ranging from wide swaths to darting, concise interventions, with each panel acting as if a different movement from a Schubert Piano Trio. The chromatic range achieved here is wider than the artist’s typical palette, ranging from the rich tenor of her favored peaches, oranges, and reds, to the soprano of her slate blue and electric pink, which parry her larger forms of warm color. Most exceptional is Brown’s scintillating use of black and white across her panels. The two diametrical oppositions dance across the composition in a pas de deux, each interjection of black given a corresponding riposte in white. Her brilliant incorporation of vibrant and dark colors into a unified tableau with such expressive force identifies Brown as the inheritor of the colorito tradition, passed down from Titian and Rubens through Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. It’s not yesterday anymore is a dialectical paragone reestablishing the dominance of color in the contemporary era.
Brown’s carefully arranged composition is similarly situated in a careful balance across her canvases. The artist inserts a bold jot of pure white at the exact center of her central panel. This insertion grounds the rest of the composition, immediately arresting the viewer’s attention, providing an alluring opening into the rest of the tableau. A similar dynamic is at play in Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (1852-55, Metropolitan Museum of Art). In an interview conducted the same year the present work was painted, Brown extolls Bonheur’s magnum opus: “Speaking of openings—doesn’t your eye go immediately to Rosa Bonheur’s white horse, the one looking at you? It really is the eye of the storm... The way it’s put together is so virtuosic. Look at how she used white to tell the story. There’s a rush of movement across the center, and your eye bounces from the horse on the left to the horse in the middle” (C. Brown, quoted in A. Eaker, “Window, Mirror, Sage: A Conversation with Cecily Brown,” in I. Alteveer, Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2023, pp. 111-112). In It’s not yesterday anymore, Brown explores similar strategies, engaging her audience with her central display of white before allowing her rushes of movement to move the gaze across the varied terrains of the work.
Brown especially favors her black tones in the periphery of her painting, utilizing the dark washes as a sort of fictive frame which contains her virtuoso strokes: “I want to threaten to burst through the picture plane but not actually do it” (C. Brown, quoted in ibid., p. 108). Brown pursues a similar framing strategy with black paint in her earlier When this kiss is over from 2020, which reimagines the fleshy tones found in the works of Chaïm Soutine and Philip Guston against a dark, black void. Beyond similar compositional strategies, It’s not yesterday anymore and when this kiss is over share a further connection: both titles quote lyrics from the rock band Talking Heads—the first line of “New Feeling” (1977) for the present work, and the sixth verse in “Heaven” (1979) for the latter work. The lingering darkness in both Brown’s paintings and Talking Heads’ lyrics recall the legendary art historian Linda Nochlin’s comment on morbidity in Brown’s recurring theme of memento mori: “Perhaps one should not be surprised at the emergence of this topic in Brown’s work, which has always had its dark side” (L. Nochlin, “Cecily Brown: The Erotics of Touch,” in Cecily Brown, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center, 2006, p. 58).
The aesthetic hedonism of Cecily Brown’s chromatic choices resounds across the great expanse of her triptych, which itself is a mimesis of the theatrical stage. While embracing the anachronistic triptych format favored by medieval and Renaissance altarpiece painters, Brown similarly embraces the tradition of evoking a stage performance in her painting. As the artist notes, “in recent years, and especially on the larger scale, the canvas has become like a stage for the performance of painting. I like the idea that the stage is almost the same but the performance changes” (C. Brown, quoted in A. Eaker, op. cit., p. 104). The metaphor as her canvas as stage recalls the great theatrical tableaux of Veronese and Tintoretto, while her notion of painting as performance appropriates the assertive machismo of the Abstract Expressionists. Brown continues: “with the very large paintings, when I am very physically involved with their making, they do become like a trace of a sort of performance. There are big, looping strokes, you’re going up and down ladders, going back and forth, using the whole surface all the time, really using your body. In the end, what the painting becomes is a record of your movements. It really is very close to dance” (C. Brown, quoted in ibid., p. 104).
It's not yesterday anymore was completed following a series of celebrated large-scale works. Brown’s Triumph of the Vanities I and Triumph of the Vanities II, spanning almost twenty-six feet in length, were commissioned for by the Metropolitan Opera House for their 2018-2019 season. Brown then painted her largest painting, the apocalyptic The Triumph of Death, in 2019. In four conjoined panels, the work was the highlight of exhibitions at Blenheim Palace in the United Kingdom and at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. Another large triptych, Unmoored from her reflection (2021), crowns the famous staircase at the summit of the Courtauld Gallery in London. The grand scale of her recent works allows Brown the space to dynamically dance in paint across the tableau, unmoored from the restrictions of conventional dimensions. The lessons learnt across these works are recapitulated in it’s not yesterday anymore. A stage for the careful choreography of pigment and gesture, the triptych captures the full drama of Brown’s evolving practice, where each stroke records the pulse of performance. With its sweeping scale and virtuosic execution, the painting stands as a consummate expression of Brown’s painterly prowess, testifying to the enduring possibilities of abstraction.
Cecily Brown painted across all three panels of her triptych simultaneously, allowing her unrelenting rain of strokes to cross from one canvas into the next to establish a continuous sense of movement across planes. Highly attuned to tempo, Brown plays with altering themes and variations across the painting, varying the width and length of each brushstroke, ranging from wide swaths to darting, concise interventions, with each panel acting as if a different movement from a Schubert Piano Trio. The chromatic range achieved here is wider than the artist’s typical palette, ranging from the rich tenor of her favored peaches, oranges, and reds, to the soprano of her slate blue and electric pink, which parry her larger forms of warm color. Most exceptional is Brown’s scintillating use of black and white across her panels. The two diametrical oppositions dance across the composition in a pas de deux, each interjection of black given a corresponding riposte in white. Her brilliant incorporation of vibrant and dark colors into a unified tableau with such expressive force identifies Brown as the inheritor of the colorito tradition, passed down from Titian and Rubens through Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. It’s not yesterday anymore is a dialectical paragone reestablishing the dominance of color in the contemporary era.
Brown’s carefully arranged composition is similarly situated in a careful balance across her canvases. The artist inserts a bold jot of pure white at the exact center of her central panel. This insertion grounds the rest of the composition, immediately arresting the viewer’s attention, providing an alluring opening into the rest of the tableau. A similar dynamic is at play in Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (1852-55, Metropolitan Museum of Art). In an interview conducted the same year the present work was painted, Brown extolls Bonheur’s magnum opus: “Speaking of openings—doesn’t your eye go immediately to Rosa Bonheur’s white horse, the one looking at you? It really is the eye of the storm... The way it’s put together is so virtuosic. Look at how she used white to tell the story. There’s a rush of movement across the center, and your eye bounces from the horse on the left to the horse in the middle” (C. Brown, quoted in A. Eaker, “Window, Mirror, Sage: A Conversation with Cecily Brown,” in I. Alteveer, Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2023, pp. 111-112). In It’s not yesterday anymore, Brown explores similar strategies, engaging her audience with her central display of white before allowing her rushes of movement to move the gaze across the varied terrains of the work.
Brown especially favors her black tones in the periphery of her painting, utilizing the dark washes as a sort of fictive frame which contains her virtuoso strokes: “I want to threaten to burst through the picture plane but not actually do it” (C. Brown, quoted in ibid., p. 108). Brown pursues a similar framing strategy with black paint in her earlier When this kiss is over from 2020, which reimagines the fleshy tones found in the works of Chaïm Soutine and Philip Guston against a dark, black void. Beyond similar compositional strategies, It’s not yesterday anymore and when this kiss is over share a further connection: both titles quote lyrics from the rock band Talking Heads—the first line of “New Feeling” (1977) for the present work, and the sixth verse in “Heaven” (1979) for the latter work. The lingering darkness in both Brown’s paintings and Talking Heads’ lyrics recall the legendary art historian Linda Nochlin’s comment on morbidity in Brown’s recurring theme of memento mori: “Perhaps one should not be surprised at the emergence of this topic in Brown’s work, which has always had its dark side” (L. Nochlin, “Cecily Brown: The Erotics of Touch,” in Cecily Brown, exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center, 2006, p. 58).
The aesthetic hedonism of Cecily Brown’s chromatic choices resounds across the great expanse of her triptych, which itself is a mimesis of the theatrical stage. While embracing the anachronistic triptych format favored by medieval and Renaissance altarpiece painters, Brown similarly embraces the tradition of evoking a stage performance in her painting. As the artist notes, “in recent years, and especially on the larger scale, the canvas has become like a stage for the performance of painting. I like the idea that the stage is almost the same but the performance changes” (C. Brown, quoted in A. Eaker, op. cit., p. 104). The metaphor as her canvas as stage recalls the great theatrical tableaux of Veronese and Tintoretto, while her notion of painting as performance appropriates the assertive machismo of the Abstract Expressionists. Brown continues: “with the very large paintings, when I am very physically involved with their making, they do become like a trace of a sort of performance. There are big, looping strokes, you’re going up and down ladders, going back and forth, using the whole surface all the time, really using your body. In the end, what the painting becomes is a record of your movements. It really is very close to dance” (C. Brown, quoted in ibid., p. 104).
It's not yesterday anymore was completed following a series of celebrated large-scale works. Brown’s Triumph of the Vanities I and Triumph of the Vanities II, spanning almost twenty-six feet in length, were commissioned for by the Metropolitan Opera House for their 2018-2019 season. Brown then painted her largest painting, the apocalyptic The Triumph of Death, in 2019. In four conjoined panels, the work was the highlight of exhibitions at Blenheim Palace in the United Kingdom and at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. Another large triptych, Unmoored from her reflection (2021), crowns the famous staircase at the summit of the Courtauld Gallery in London. The grand scale of her recent works allows Brown the space to dynamically dance in paint across the tableau, unmoored from the restrictions of conventional dimensions. The lessons learnt across these works are recapitulated in it’s not yesterday anymore. A stage for the careful choreography of pigment and gesture, the triptych captures the full drama of Brown’s evolving practice, where each stroke records the pulse of performance. With its sweeping scale and virtuosic execution, the painting stands as a consummate expression of Brown’s painterly prowess, testifying to the enduring possibilities of abstraction.